Groovy prog rock
After hearing some mp3 formatted recordings of songs off of this album, as well as "Red", and "In the Wake of Poseidon", I purchased this album. I fell in love with their clouded, mellow, nostalgic sound, accented by flutes and other high-pitched instruments; the song that really caught me was Moonchild, often criticized for being too long or unstructured a track. Admittedly, the song is pretty long, but the fact remains, this is art/prog rock. Strict structural boundaries are exactly what an artist in the field would try to challenge, at least to some degree. I am quite satisfied with this album. If you have any doubts, at least listen to samples of the aforementioned albums. I highly doubt you won't love at least one song.
|
Why This Is Still A Revolutionary Album.
This is a very long review in which I will try to get somewhere near the heart of this album. I hope you will bear with me in agreement that this fabulous album is worth it.
I remember very well when this recording was originally released in 1969 because I was a teenage musician playing my first paying gigs as lead vocalist and guitarist for a competent but not very creative or imaginative band that would not give in to my insistence that we play only original material. Though I was surviving on the income from the gigs, I was not happy and upon becoming familiar with the amazing In The Court Of The Crimson King, literally because of that album, I promptly quit that band and began searching for another because I refused to tolerate any longer not playing rock music that was genuinely creative and artistic. I didn't have much immediate luck in my search and I consequently spent a lot of time broke and alone working on my guitar playing, singing, and songwriting skills. I also spent a lot of time learning to play along with this recording and in the process I learned why it is, in my opinion anyway, one of the best rock albums ever created. I also learned that it is a very unusual rock album in both its thematic and compositional complexity.
Though this album has a common reputation of being such, it is not just a collection songs. It is closer to being a single diverse symphonic type of work. It is not a so-called concept album, but its musical and thematic unity is actually more complex and deep than what one finds in rock concept albums. In fact, and I mean this seriously, it is actually too complex to be contained by the ordinary concept method of structuring yet it is a work held together as one by the deep relationship between the individual tracks both thematically and musically. By the time I had learned to play all of the tracks on both guitar and piano by just listening to them over and over literally thousands of times, I realized that there was a deep literary-musical story going on here. I mean story in the deepest sense of a single meaningful process unfolding without any core breaks regardless of the apparent breaks in the surface. It is similar to the way the movements of a Beethoven symphony are actually profoundly related to each other though they may seem to have little in common on the surface. The sympathetic listener may not directly see all this compositional relatedness, but he feels it in his deep satisfaction with the work as whole. And this is not mere coincidence, it is the result of the artist, or artists in the case of King Crimson, having a large, single, unifying vision that manifests itself in each of the parts that make up the whole. My guess about the reason why the structural unity of this work is not common knowledge is that in the history of rock music there are simply not enough rock albums that contain this kind of deep structural integrity on both a thematic and musical composition level for the listeners of rock music to have developed a pattern of listening for this kind of integrity. And remember that when this album first came out the very idea of rock music as serious art was still very new and widely questioned, that is, there were not very many good receptive listeners around. And In The Court Of The Crimson King was by no means a popular album. It had passionately devoted admirers, including me, but not a lot of them. It took years for it to become commonly apparent what an important album this is. This album is much more widely respected now than it was in the first years after its release and that's because many of its revolutionary elements were adopted, adapted, borrowed, and just plain ripped-off by many different music groups over many years so that people became use to hearing them and therefore the originator of all those elements no longer sounded so strange and intimidating. So In The Court Of The Crimson King no longer seems like a revolutionary album however much power it may still carry, but it really still is revolutionary because its deepest qualities are still not generally appreciated by most rock listeners. And if I can alter that even in some very small way here I will be very gratified.
Let me just offer two areas for thought and listening. I am not going to give you some magic key that will clearly reveal the structural heart of this album, I would have to sit down at a piano and do an analysis of the entire album, including the lyrics, to even approach that, but I can give you some openings where you can begin an exploration process of your own if you are interested.
First: There is something that must be understood. The foundation points for almost all conventional rock music composition are two notes that can also be translated into two chords. These two notes are the one-note and the five-note. This is very simple. The one-note is the tone that tells you what key you are in. All conventional rock songs are in some key. The five-note is just five steps up the major scale from the one-note. If A is our one-note which tells us that we are in the key of A then we go five steps up: A, B, C, D, E. E is the five-note. If we translate it into chords, A is the one chord and E is the five chord. The relationship between these two points is what holds almost all conventional rock music together. Without it, most rock music would cease to exist. The basic structures of rock music really are that simple. The one chord is the point of maximal resolution and the five chord is the point of the maximal tension that leads back into the resolution of the one chord. Everything else that happens, happens between these two points. One of the reasons why the seemingly primitive and simplistic song WILD THING, by the Troggs was such an effective rock and roll song was that it pounds on the one chord and pounds on the five chord, it was like rock and roll burnt down to its essential skeleton. So why is this so important in trying to understand IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING? Because one of the revolutionary elements of this rock album is that this structural foundation I have described is given a twist that changed the world of rock music. This was done by writing rock music in which the five-note was replaced by or accompanied by a five-note that was flatted, that is, taken down one half-step. So instead of our orienting points being, for example, A and E, they are now A and E flat. You may think that that doesn't sound like much of a change, but it makes the foundation of conventional rock songwriting collapse. King Crimson still uses the one-five foundation but it is pervasively haunted by the flatted five. I'll give two examples. I remember when I was trying to learn how to play Robert Fripp's lead in 21st CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN, I was amazed by the way he kept violating the ordinary blues scale that is usually used in rock guitar leads by playing the flatted five note instead of the five note. He did it so often that in fact his lead turned around this interval of one to flatted five which happens to be called a tritone. At that time there was no such thing as a lead that turned around a flatted five. It was wonderfully weird and beautifully unsettling. Then I discovered that the entire title track, IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING, was also built around the tritone. This track begins with a D chord and then changes to a C chord, but when the C chord comes it retains the three-note from the D chord which sits on top of the C chord and that added note just happens to the flatted five note of the C chord. You know that familiar passage that begins this track and is repeated many times at the end of the track, well the second chord in that passage is a C chord with a flatted five added, a tritone. That alone made this album truly original, but that only scratches the surface.
Second: I have noticed that many reviewers of this album dismiss the fourth track, MOON CHILD, as inferior and even unnecessary. But in fact it is essential to the deeper life of the album both thematically and musically. The album as a whole would not stand without it. The Moonchild is the archetypal polar point opposing the archetypal point of the Crimson King. The good but melancholy Moonchild is waiting for the appearance of the smiling Sunchild. This means that she is waiting to become a fulfilled reality. She is not fulfilled and that is why the lovely music that represents her becomes so insubstantial in the improvisation that follows her song that it almost dissolves into silence. But the Sunchild is not an archetype. In a sense, the Sunchild does not yet exist. The Sunchild is the man who escapes the domination of the Crimson King and who avoids becoming the Schizoid Man. The Sunchild, who has not yet found and united with the Moonchild, sings I TALK TO THE WIND and then at the peak of his despair sings EPITAPH. But though the album closes with emphasis on the dark Crimson King, it is not simply pessimistic. This is revealed by two facts. One is that the MOONCHILD survives within this final track even though she is dominated by Crimson King. After the third verse in this final track there is an instrumental passage played by bass, cymbals, and flute that is eventually joined by the guitar and if you listen closely to it you will see that it is an extension of the music from the MOON CHILD track that is then harshly and dramatically reabsorbed back into the Crimson King music. But very importantly, this Crimson King music actually resolves in the key of D major which is a bright, positive and even triumphant key unlike 21st CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN and EPITAPH which are both in dark minor keys. The meaning of this positive D major resolution is very important and subtly complex and really opens up the complexity of the entire album. The positive quality of the key in the final track suggests the triumph of the Sunchild and thereby of the Moonchild as well. But this music is coupled with the dominating presence of the evil Crimson King. And as I said before, this D major music is also haunted by the presence of the eerie tritone which is either dark or light depending on how you look at it. In spite of the dark point reached in EPITAPH, the struggle is not over or doomed. It goes on and the Sunchild may yet find his way out of the darkness that is the Court of the Crimson. And it must be understood that this story is told not just by the lyrics, but by the music as well. The structural unity of this album is unique and amazing. I hope you will dive in and explore it for yourself.
|